TNAG-1530-FCO40-2094-Hong-Kong-Vietnamese-refugees-general-1986 — Page 50

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RECCIVA

1 1 NOV 1986

185

VIETNAMESE REFUGEES IN HONG KONG

1.

INDEA

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...

Mr Flesher and Mr McDowell from the Home Office called on the afternoon of 22 October. I showed them our draft brief for FCO Ministers' meetings next week with Mr Hocké, and they were content with this. I said it would obviously be much better if we could be more positive with Mr Hocké as regards our continuing to accept Vietnamese

Vietnamese refugees from Hong Kong for resettlement. We had been considering whether to recommend a further approach by our Ministers to Home Office Ministers following Waddington's visit to Hong Kong, to seek a formal Home Office response on

a continuation/extension of the post-SCORRI resettlement programme. Did they think this would be useful?

2.

Mr

Mr Flesher said that until now, Mr Waddington had been continuing to take a fairly hard line about what he saw as "new commitments". He added that, from his time at No 10, he knew that the Home Office were being kept on a pretty tight reign as regards refugee resettlement in the UK, and that anything which had to be presented as a "new commitment" would have to be considered by Ministers collectively. It might, however, possible to get Mr Waddington to agree to a continuation of resettlement for a limited period on the basis that this was within existing commitments.

The agencies were seeing

be

Mr Waddington that afternoon to argue their case that a number of people coming within the SCORRI criteria had been left out initially because the agencies were not aware that the Home Office had set any numerical limit, and that therefore there were still a large number of people whom the Government had an obligation to resettle.

The visitors were not sure how Mr Waddington would respond to this line, though Mr McDowell commented that he had not seemed entirely negative. He added, however, that Mr Hyde had recently minuted to Mr Waddington to say that the Home Office needed to consider the question of further resettlement, and this had been firmly rejected.

3.

I said that from our point of view, we needed some sort of continuation of the resettlement programme in order to have a hand in the game of finding a more durable solution. We would simply not be taken seriously by the UNHCR, the major resettlement countries or other countries unless we continued to take some refugees ourselves. Also, it was important that the machinery set up by the agencies with local authorities and others to resettle 40 refugees a month should not be dismantled. And we were concerned that should resettlement to the UK now stop, with a resultant reduction in resettlement by other countries, the situation in the closed camps in Hong Kong would become very serious.

CONFIDENTIAL